This blog shows three of my top suggested ways you can improve your email open rate and email deliverability. The truth is, if no one opens the emails you send out then your entire message gets lost. However, escaping the spam folder and getting people to open your emails is not always a simple task. The three strategies I suggest will give you actionable steps you can take to have the most success with your email marketing campaigns.

In addition, I will describe ways to strengthen your email service provider reputation. This way you can land in more people's inboxes. Whether you are an email marketer, freelancer, consultant, or business owner, email is a vital tool to capitalize on to be in direct contact with your potential / existing customers.

Sneak Peek:

• #1- Add value

• #2 - Focus On Engagement

• #3 - Encourage Replies
  

The first way you can improve your email open rate is by providing the most value that you can. This means avoiding spamming people with too many emails. This also means avoiding sending sales out one after another. You want to instead focus on delivering value. When you provide value to someone, they're going to look forward to your emails. They're also going to be able to understand that it's a give and take relationship. People want to see that you're not just trying to sell them something. Rather, they see you're giving value. This way in return people might be more open to considering your product or service in the future. 

There's a lot of different ways to add value, and it's all based on what industry your business or the client you are working for's business is in. A few ways you can add free value through your email marketing campaigns is to:

• Providing free content that is helpful for the reader
• Create free articles / blogs for the reader to learn or be entertained
• Give out free information about the product or the service that you offer the benefits

Another way to add more value is to filter and segment your email marketing list. You'll see so much more success if you segment out your list. Segmentation can be summarized as adding different tags based on what the customer is doing or where they're at in their journey. Once you begin to do that, you can add more value and send out targeted messages to portions of your list...rather than sending the same message to everyone. So instead of trying to send out a general message, you can send specific messages out to that exact right segment of your database. This is going to help you get more email opens and improve your overall email deliverability. Ultimately, by segmenting your email marketing list, people are going to feel that they are getting much more value from the emails and that they are more personalized.

Another way to add value is to consider making a 'welcome automation.' This is where you create an email automation sequence which triggers whenever someone subscribes. The welcome email is meant to inform the new email subscribers what to expect, let them know how to unsubscribe, and instruct them to add your email address to their main folder. This way you don’t get marked as spam or promotions. (The chances are high that your email recipients are already getting blasted with emails from other companies and sources.) That is why you should be delivering meaningful, valuable, and interesting content. You should also consider lead nurturing campaigns, as well as becoming a pro at email copywriting. 

Key Takeaway: Filter and segment your list to add even more value!

The second way you can increase your email opens is all about focusing on engagement. Engagement is when someone opens your email, clicks a link in your email, or replies to your email. That all goes into your email reputation. It's important to understand that you have a reputation when you start to provide email marketing services. Your reputation is built on several different criteria. This Includes how many emails you send out, how many people marked those emails as spam. Alongside, how frequently your emails are getting bounced (which is when an email is undeliverable due to a typo or an old email address that's no longer active). Your business reputation is based on how many recipients are opening your emails, forwarding them, and how many people are unsubscribing. All of that goes into your email reputation and when you're just starting, it's just like anything else you do in life. If you start and you have no experience, your reputation is going to be on ground level. If that's you, then email reputation is something you need to work on improving.

Focusing on engagement is helpful because it ties back to that first point of giving value. When people see that they're getting value, they're more likely to engage with your content. Especially if you're segmenting your audience the right way. This is going to help you improve all of your states dramatically. When you start to get higher email open rates and more begin interacting and replying, the higher your reputation will become. Ultimately, this helps dramatically with getting your email into people's actual inbox, as opposed to their spam folder or promotions tab.

Another way to create more user engagement is to build multiple email automation sequences. Based on the type of value you are providing you can select a specific trigger to start an automation. From there, you can benefit from creating a chain of multiple emails that the contact will receive over time. The best part is that you only have to write these emails once, but then the automation does all the work in the background. Everyone that ends up going through the automation get's the emails at the right times. The better email automations you can set up, the more engagement you will see.

Generating a high level of engagement also helps boost your email reputation, which consists of:

• How many emails you are sending out

• How many recipients mark your emails as spam

• How frequently your emails drop into ISP spam traps

• Whether your business appears on blacklists

• How many of your emails bounce

• How many recipients are opening, replying to, forwarding, and deleting your emails

• How many recipients are unsubscribing from your email list

Key takeaway: When you implement these different ways to improve deliverability, you will see your email reputation improve. 

The third way you can improve your email open rate and deliverability is to encourage email replies. For every email campaign you schedule, remember that it's important to focus on improving the number of replies that they generate. Getting replies to your email marketing campaigns provides a huge indicator to the email service provider that you are giving out good content because people are engaging with it and replying back to you.

There are a couple of different ways to get more replies, but they both relate to being direct. The first is to hold a contest. I like this idea because I won tickets to a free show from an email giveaway recently. One of my favorite violinists was performing locally and one day I received an email that said,

" The first three people that respond to this email with the show date and the time they want to attend, will win free tickets +1 to the upcoming shows this week!"

By hosting a small giveaway that encouraged email replies, it probably generated hundreds if not thousands of people who replied to enter the contest. So not only were they able to get replies from a large number of people, but they also were able to incentivize them as as quick as possible.

Another example is simply asking for replies at the end of the email. People are typically open to sharing when you ask them for feedback and ideas on what kind of content they want to see next. This also goes back to the other points that you are there to add value. You're not just trying to sell your service or products, but you're there to give back. When people understand that, they will start to interact and reply to you more often which builds customer loyalty to your brand or business.

As an email marketer, remember that email is not dead and so many people have their phone with them every single minute of the day. Even when they go to sleep their phone is right next to them. Email is right at the touch of everyone's palm, and even if they don't always open every email, they are used to using it. It's one of the best ways to get directly in touch with someone.

Key takeaway: When you encourage engagement, you will improve your open rates and deliverability stats. This will lead to more success in your email marketing as a freelancer.

When you're trying to get a higher open rate for your email campaign, focus on your email subject line and giving value. Also, be open and transparent that you want people to get back in touch with you. If you're not able to get your emails opened, they will start to show up in the spam folder and you won't get to reach your customers, so be sure to implement the three methods revealed in this blog to improve your email open rate.

If you want to see more about this subject, I made a video going over ways you can get more email open rates which you can watch by clicking here. 

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